tJP

I spent many years working as a Windows product manager for Microsoft. To be even asking this question seems strange.

So I have spend a few weeks looking at replacing my Notebook and Smart-phone and here’s the points I have looked at:

1. Current SW- MS Office, Firefox, Tweetdeck, MindManager, GTD Add-on for Outlook
2. What my customers run - mainly Windows but some have Mac’s.
3. How I work -spent lots of time in Office and Outlook in particular. Added GTD Add-in to manage tasks and projects. This syncs to a very old Palm Tungsten E. Means I have everything in one place on the road or in the office. Unfortunately phone is separate.

In making a decision point 3 became the key driver. The Office Apps run well on both platforms, email is available on both and a blue cable is standard.

So the decision came down to handling GTD Tasks on the notebook and the phone. ( As an aside I believe David Allen still runs his mobile office on a Palm Treo - last I asked). From a phone perspective, this knocks out the Nokia platform as Symbian just does not handle Outlook tasks well, same for iPhone as iTunes does not sync with Outlook tasks.

Looked at a purely online set of solutions, GoogleMail and taks, GTD for Firefox, Remember the Milk and a variety of other solutions. Main thing is a trusted system and to handle lots of things - with over 100 @Next Actions. Most of the solutions seemed OK, but did not a) do the GTD thing tightly b) seem to be able to quickly process large volumes of tasks with quick push-button simplicity.

So, the decision? - well the decision was to stay with Outlook and the GTD Add-in. This resulted in a decision to go Windows 7. Lots of people have told me that the MacBook will run windows apps, but my inner geek is not interested in running a VM instance. Some have asked if I have ever used a Mac, the answer is yes for a couple of years, but a long time ago. It was pretty dreadful but no worse than Vista.

The phone, well in my perfect world it would be a Palm Pre, but as they have not yet arrived in Australia, I think it will be a Blackberry or maybe a HTC based Windows mobile as both handle tasks well.

I know a lot of people moving to MacBook’s and the decision was not easy, but at the end of the day, is it 9 times better than a PC running Windows 7? Its not and this post looks at why innovations fail and switching is so hard. The 9 times better Effect.

This post was prompted by a recent conversation and also by a meeting some months back.

Both conversations were around mobile email being the ‘Killer App‘ for two different companies. One is a smart-phone manufacturer and the other a telco - both saw mobile email as the ‘Killer App’. Both are wrong because of timing.

As the wikipedia link above notes the Killer App is much sought after. But the companies who have built them don’t seem to thrive - eg Visicalc, Lotus 123, Palm. In each case the applications developed promoted and validated a platform that took off, but when competition came in the original companies did not adapt and thrive in the new environments.

In the case on mobile email there are two key reasons(in my mind) why the mobile email is not the Killer App:

1.  Every device does email (well every smart-phone does email) - some great, others OK but they all do it. So Blackberry started it, Windows Mobile, Symbian does it and iPhone makes it sexy
2. Mobile email is promoted by Telcos as a solution at a price-point. In the main the Telcos offer the same handsets, same price points, same speed, same coverage etc ( I know that Telstra will scream!)

The two point clearly that mobile email is now a commodity - that means bad in marketing speak - it means undifferentiated, price based etc yuk! Not to say that there won’t be great growth as people pick up smart-phones as predicted and volume of data increases and the your Telco will make money from their 3G network - but not a Killer App.

By the nature of these industries companies who innovate get great growth as the market grows but will have followers who will develop very similar solutions - probably at a lower price point. So what can an innovator do?

The answer lies in a variety of areas:

• What do customers want? Think about the segments carefully - such as early adopters, teens - what are their pain points and their needs, wants etc( your general market research will not answer this)
• Why did the ‘early adopter’ buy a Blackberry - what was their need and what is their current need eg is email still their #1 app or do they now tweet and its therefore about communications and not email.
• Redefine the original category - continue to push the envelope -prove you are better - better still redefine what you as a company does
• Look at what other apps you can build for your customers. For example there was no real killer app for the Windows platform although Office comes close but that was packaging a bunch of good apps at a price point - saving time/effort etc
• Fight the commodity trap - be different, do different and force people to choose - better to lose a customer because you don’t fit the bill than tonot have a clear position to defend.

So if you once had a killer app that became a commodity and its now a liability - get back to basics and understand innovation and the customers - again!